Trials of Light and Darkness

A Frozen Story

Prologue

Death is the great egalitarian finality. A beggar dies the same as a king and they are judged not for the weight of their coffers, but for the weight of their soul. Make peace with God on your deathbed, for you have sinned, my son, but your hand never finished the act and your faith may redeem you yet. Keep your head up and die with dignity.

Cardinal Melliarch,

to Hans Westergaard

A cell in Olympia,

the Southern Isles

October 7th, 1842

The cell was terribly cold, the kind that seeps into the bones and makes the body ache. There was no shelter from the stalking chill; the rags that the cell's single occupant wore were threadbare and offered little warmth with their chafing fibers. All his joints complained of ceaseless contact with stone walls, stone floor, stone bed. Nowhere soft, nowhere warm, no escape from this pit of hell.

Hans thought little anymore. His mind was wholly consumed with a search for warmth, and occasionally with the meager sustenance that he was sustained on, for that brought a momentary hotness in his stomach. The visit from the Cardinal hardly seemed worthy of note; Hans had barely been lucid enough to realize that the man wasn't a vision of the type that the former prince was swept up in so often recently. The visions were welcome, actually; at first the captive had feared what he was sure were signs that he was losing his mind, but as time passed he became ever-more grateful for these fleeting seconds of respite.

The more that the former prince surrendered himself to the visions, the more lucid they became. They featured all the things that he missed most; good food, warm sunshine, the gentle kiss of fresh air. In tantalizingly few, something more. The visions seemed more real to the prisoner than the visit from the Cardinal, although his weary mind warned him that he had mere days left in this life. The word execution lingered at the edge of his more salient thoughts, a haunting specter that reminded him of his failure.

Were Hans able to command his full mental capacity, he would recognize that his parents were desperate to maintain their international standing. A series of poor harvests and an adamant refusal to engage in the imperialistic colonization that the rest of Europe was wholly occupied by had significantly weakened the economy of the Southern Isles. The Westergaard family was reliant, therefore, on the marriage of their thirteen sons into positions of influence throughout the kingdoms of Europe. And Hans had failed them.

Not only had he failed to marry the Princess Anna Siguror, he had cast a black stain upon the family name with his botched regicide of the Ice Queen. Desperate to save face amidst a sea of increasingly hostile foreign powers, the Westergaard family had strongly condemned the actions of the former prince and branded him unstable, uncontrollable. Power hungry. His family had not come to his defense when the kingdoms of Europe had demanded that, per the Congress of Vienna's statutes, the former prince's actions had constituted high treason. His own father had not blinked when the verdict was reached: Hans was to be severed from the bloodline and executed by hanging for his crimes.

This all had come nearly two years ago. The lavish cell of a royal political prisoner that he had occupied before was traded for the feculent box of stone in which he currently languished. Seemingly endless cycles of appeals and postponed hearings had finally been spent, and over three years since his arrest, Hans was to be executed on Tuesday.

But he hardly thought of this; the prisoner had long since come to peace with his impending death. He still feared it, yes, for only the fool does not fear death; but Hans had already been to hell and Satan could do nothing worse to him than had already been done. So it was this peace that found the former prince lying upon the stone cot of his cell the night before his execution, his impending death quite the last thing on his mind.

He felt his extremities, something that had not happened for longer than Hans could remember. They tingled with a strange sensation that the former prince realized was warmth, and he was too far gone to realize that he was beginning another hallucination.

Hans opened his eyes and saw glinting sunlight, felt its gentle warmth kiss every inch of his exposed flesh. He saw that he wore a pressed white military jacket with the epaulets that he had favored in his youth to demonstrate his military captaincy, and realized that he was in the royal gardens in Olympia. The gardens were mere miles from the dungeons in which the prisoner languished, but this vision felt a lifetime away. Hans felt himself walking briskly up a small hillock in the garden, clutching one hand around something behind his back.

A surge of joy filled the former prince as he realized that he remembered this day, a tingling excitement as he anticipated seeing her again. Hans could not control himself; he was merely an observer, occupying this body, unbroken by years of imprisonment, one last time. He felt the confidence in his stride and realized just how broken his limp must currently be. He crept up slowly to the top of the fill where the familiar, bowed willow tree was planted; underneath it he saw the same simple wooden bench of his memory. His entire soul screamed that he should run, tear around the tree and gaze into the face of beauty that awaited him, but his sovereign limbs followed the commands of another man.

Hans crept up behind the tree, peering about it to see a head of golden hair seated at the bench, writing thoughtfully in a diary. The prisoner's heart leapt at the sight of her and he felt his eyes well with emotion, though he knew that the man whose body he occupied was quite far from tears. Her voice, beautiful and light and girlish, floated playfully towards him, quite aware as she was that she was being watched.

"Why, dear diary, I mustn't forget to tell you the most delightful thing that happened today. There were some men from the army on parade in the courtyard today to be inspected by daddy. I came along, of course, because it's such a delight to see the handsome young army fellows, all dressed up in their uniforms. Now, there were some lookers among them, but I'm quite sure that the most handsome of them all gave me eyes as we walked past him…" as the girl finished this sentence she turned and glanced over her shoulder just as Hans presented himself from behind the tree.

"My lady." Hans sunk into a formal bow, taking one of her hands and brushing his lips salaciously to it. The prisoner felt his mouth tingle and wished that the moment had not been so fleeting.

The girl gasped in faux shock and hung her free hand over her heart, saying, "Oh, my, prince Hans! Whoever taught you manners forgot to emphasize that you mustn't listen in on the daydreaming of a young lady!" Even as she reprimanded him, the young lady fluttered long lashes at him.

"My dear Miss James, I assure you that I heard nothing untoward," the prince said with the same bullish confidence that he used to wear as broadly as his epaulets.

"Please," the girl simpered as Hans took a seat on the bench beside her, one hand still clutched behind his back. "Call me Mallory, dear prince. What is it you've got behind your back?" Mallory tried to lean about and see, but the prince shifted his position to keep his hidden object out of view.

"Only," Hans said, chuckling, "if you likewise promise to call me only Hans. Not prince or anything of the sort. You'll embarrass me." He winked at her.

"Oh, all right," Mallory said, laughing as she was now attempting to reach around him. "Hans. You happy? Now what have you got?" More of that light, girlish laugh that made his heart leap.

With a flourish, Hans drew a bouquet of roses from behind his back. "A bouquet of roses, for the only woman that I could ever have eyes for. My dear Mallory."

"Oh, Hans!" Mallory said breathlessly as she took them and held them up to her nose. "They're beautiful!"

"Compared to you, m'dear, they are nothing but a paltry tribute."

Mallory looked up and swatted at him with a hand. "Oh, come off it. You'll swell my head."

Hans laughed and drew his arm around the general's daughter, sitting happily for a moment.

"Do you have a guess, which one of those military boys I fancied?"

"Well, I certainly hope that it was me."

Again the prisoner heard her beautiful, carefree laugh. "I certainly hope that it was you as well, because if it wasn't then mine eyes doth deceive me. Yet, even if they did and I saw another man with your face, dear Hans, I would not trifle for an instant to think that it was you, for I recognize a noble soul when I see one."

At the end of this, she grew more serious, though still warm, and rest her hand against his chest. "And you, my dear prince, have a nobler soul than any I know."

The swelling irony of it all brought bitter, stinging tears to the former prince's eyes. He wanted to scream, O, but how I deceived us both, my love! The selfsame man that wooed you with acts of selflessness and nobility in his youth would fall lower than the meanest wretch! My own folly caused the death of my only, sweet love, and drove me to commit ever-graver acts of base and vile nature. I am irredeemable.

But the current prince, that man who so little resembled the vile creature that he would become, did not say any of those things. Instead, he merely smiled a sure thing, as if he knew all along, in the end, that of course Mallory James could have eyes for no other man.

Even as Hans opened his mouth to speak again, the prisoner felt that the vision was fading. He began to hear noise in the far distance, as if his head were underwater. Clunking footsteps. Bringing him back from the brink, tearing him away from the lightness and happiness of the memory and returning him to the unforgiving cell of the present.

The footsteps of what sounded to be a pair of men came to a halt outside of Hans's door. He barely registered what this meant until, after some fumbling with the key, there was a thick clunking noise and the door creaked open. Even wan lanternlight was blinding to Hans for several moments and he had to shield his gaze; he heard one of the men place one of the lanterns on the hook just inside his cell.

After a moment, Hans removed his arm to see that two guards remained just outside of the room while a lone man had come inside. He was middle-aged and fairly short, and he wore a limp. The man's hair was lank, and his skin was very pallid. In the lanternlight Hans could see a flash of gold within the man's mouth. With a sudden surge of fear, Hans wondered if his time had come. The prisoner had a difficult time keeping track of the day; he knew that his execution was rapidly approaching. With a rush of finality all the work Hans had done to prepare himself for the end unraveled and the former prince realized that he was not ready to die.

"Leave us alone a moment, if you please," the man said in a gravelly voice. The guards complied, shutting the door to the cell behind them and returning to the end of the hall. The stranger waited until he heard the footsteps of the guards fully retreated before he began to speak.

"I'm fine to stand, thank you very much, this won't take much of your time." A moment's confusion ended with an inborn embarrassment as Hans remembered, from what seemed like another lifetime, that it was rude of him not to have offered the stranger a seat.

"Matter of fact, if all goes well here, you might just gain some time back," the man said enigmatically. "But of course, introductions are in order. I'm already well acquainted with you, Mister Westergaard, but I don't believe that you know who I am."

Hans blankly shook his head, and the man spoke again, smiling a bit as he did so that his golden tooth gleamed in the lanternlight. "My name, to make things simpler, is a secret. But most people these days call me Mister Gold."

Mr. Gold extended his hand and did not have to cross much distance in the tiny cell to shake hands with the prisoner; his grip was firmer than his gaunt figure would imply. Hans found his voice and spoke in a labored tone cultivated by years of disuse. "Why are you here?"

"I'm here to give you a way out, Mister Westergaard. That is, if you're willing to take the plunge." Something horrible and greedy flashed in Mr. Gold's eyes that might have frightened Hans if he wasn't already being confronted with the finality of death. In his current state, however, he saw a lifeline and he grasped for it.

"What do you mean, 'a way out?' Can you get me out of here?" Hans spoke with the manic frenzy of the starving man confronted with a feast.

"I certainly can, Mister Westergaard," Mr. Gold said smilingly, raising a solitary finger just as Hans's eyes began to glimmer with hope. "But…"

"But what?" Hans demanded. If he had imagined that, confronted with death, he might go with dignity, then he was sorely mistaken. He was desperate to cling to even the meager existence he had left. Coward, he heard an inner voice say to him. He pushed it down.

"But," Mr. Gold continued, clearly enjoying having the former prince hang on his words, "You must realize that I cannot do so with law. You are as good as a dead man in the eyes of the Southern Isles."

"What then? Do we escape?" Hans said greedily, his mind already filling with the image of a dashing scoundrel in exile, always on the run.

"Not quite," the gold-toothed stranger said as he drew a gleaming blade from within his coat. "The only tool that I've left to free you with is magic."

Looking warily at the knife and immediately skeptical, Hans withdrew from the man and returned to his cot. "What do you mean, magic?"

"Well, you see, I'm here doing a favor for a longtime friend of mine," Mr. Gold said as he began to slowly pace the floor in front of the prisoner's stone cot, twirling the knife about in one of his gnarled hands. "This friend has a particular use for people such as yourself. People who are about to die, people who are clinging desperately at any chance they might get to soldier on in this world of ours."

"What are you talking about?" Hans had begun to grow scared as this Mr. Gold continued to speak; the prisoner was growing quite certain that this man was going to ask him to do something awful.

"You would go to work for this friend of mine, rather than die, you see. In exchange for the ability to return to this world, you would spend your time in it doing his bidding."

Hans's cowardice disgusted himself, but he found himself say it anyway. "But... I wouldn't die?"

"More or less," Mr. Gold said, that same manic gleam in his face.

"What exactly does this friend of yours use people like me to do?"

"Oh, a little of this, a little of that," Mr. Gold said cryptically. "All small prices to pay to live forever."

There was a long beat in which Hans felt the blood rushing in his ears. "What do I have to do?"

Mr. Gold closed the distance between them now, smiling gleefully, and held the knife out for the former prince. Up close, Hans could see that the hilt was triangular, and its flat sides were covered with runic text that he did not recognize.

"This is a special kind of knife. It's called a 'tensing blade,' and it captures the soul of whosoever it comes to... end. To go to my friend, you must pierce your own heart with this knife."

"What?" Hans felt the blood rushing in his ears grow louder as he looked at the man's hands. All he could see was the gleam of the blade; it was so bright that it burned in the back of eyes and each time he blinked he saw its shimmering outline. "You're trying to get me to commit suicide!"

"Of course I am!" Mr. Gold was growing ever more animated, almost frantic. "You must take a leap of faith, Mister Westergaard, and trust that my friend will be waiting for you on the other side!"

Hans still hesitated, looking uncomfortably at the blade mere inches from his chest.

"What the hell have you got to lose, man?" The entrant to the cell was practically yelling now, his fervor having reached a fever pitch. "You'll be dead tomorrow regardless! Take a leap of faith!"

The man's words pounding in his ears above the hammer of his heart, Hans reached out and placed his hands around the hilt of the blade.

"Yes! Yes! Do it!" Mr. Gold was screaming now, and Hans heard the shouts of the guards at the end of the corridor, heard their rushing footsteps. He had little time.

The screams of Mr. Gold sounded faraway in an instant, as if Hans had shoved his head underwater. In the next second he heard only his heartbeat. Once. The prisoner drew his last breath in this life. Twice. He mustered his strength and plunged the knife towards himself. Thrice.

xxx

The guards were required to force open the door to the cell; something or someone on the inside had managed to barricade it. Their shouting subsided as the door fell inwards, revealing that Mr. Gold was nowhere to be seen. All that was left in the cell was the prisoner slumped against the wall, bleeding onto his cot from a horrible wound in his chest. He was already dead.